It's tempting to dismiss a presidential zero-hoper such as Beto O'Rourke as a disgusting leftist clown.

After all, his latest stunt is to call for stripping churches of their tax-exempt status if they don't change their beliefs to match his on homosexual "marriage."

Kid you not: Following the headlines he garnered after vowing to grab guns, he's now drawn some new ones with this:

Beto O'Rourke said he thinks that religious institutions should be stripped of their tax-exempt status if they oppose homosexuality.

While at a CNN candidate forum about gay and transgender issues, moderator Don Lemon asked the 47-year-old former congressman whether he supported revoking the tax-exempt status for religious institutions such as churches, colleges, and charities, if they don't support gay marriage.

"Yes," O'Rourke responded, to much applause.

This pretty well scuppers the First Amendment, given that now some churches are to be more equal than others in Betoworld.  Did he say anything about taxing devil-worship churches for being repulsive?  Nope, just the ones whose traditional beliefs date back millennia. 

Dictators love to use measures like these — punitive taxation to drive what they dislike from the public square.  Just ask any buyer of newsprint in a socialist hellhole.

It also goes back to the old Obama plan to bankrupt the coal industry through taxation instead of the more basic Marxist expropriation.

Now that Obama's opened that can of worms, Beto's jumped right in, with a plan to tax churches until they change their theology to fit his. 

It's nasty stuff, given that it's a road to tyranny.  Such a plan doesn't stop at gay "marriage" — taxation could then be employed to enforce conformity for any reason if Beto gets his way.  How about some new taxation for being fat, protesting gun grabs, or not speaking Spanish?  By Beto's logic, any of that could be done.  Obama pioneered the idea of government picking and choosing which companies can flourish, and now Beto's extending it to churches.  Don't think it will stop at churches.

Beto has been exposed as a punk since his campaign launch, what with his computer hacking history, his sick murder fantasies, his pervert poetry, his skateboarding to remind women of their worst boyfriends, and his drunk driving hit-and-run problems.  He's a fake Latino and a very rich pampered princeling whose wealth is derived from marrying an heiress, and he's not going to politically recover from any of this.

The problem is that he still craves headlines, which is why he keeps making these outrageous calls.  First, it was to grab guns; now it's to tax churches to force them to change their theologies.

Fine and dandy for this loser to scream crazy stuff, it seems, but once those ideas are out there, they generally go running like rats to the camps of the more serious Democrats and the Left in general, becoming the common leftist party line.  We see this all the time now among Democrats.

Where is the leftist Democratic candidate to oppose this blatant grotesque effort to end freedom of religion in this country?  Nowhere.  Democrats never criticize Democrats in this era; they just adopt each other's more extremist ideas, which certainly explains why Bernie Sanders has such influence.

It's a bad trend, and someone's got to call Beto's anti-democratic fantasies out.  He may be a political loser, but deep down, he still has this dictator screaming to get out, as well as a love for the cameras.

If Democrats won't do it, then Republicans are going to have to clean up the mess: call this threat to democracy out before Beto gets any more attention.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.